A/B Testing is DEAD! Ask a HiPPO Instead…

Thought you had page optimization and testing all figured out? Think again rockstar. It seems the tide is turning back in favour of opinion based design.

According to a group of notable industry experts (including Rand Fishkin, Dan Martell, David Hauser and Chris Goward), A/B testing is apparently no better … “statistically speaking” … than the subjective opinion of your average CEO or corporate “design by committee” session.

This reminds me of what somebody coined as a “HiPPO” – the Highest Paid Persons Opinion (hence my beautiful artwork above). Essentially, this means that despite your training and scientific methodologies, at the end of the day, all important decisions are still made by the boss.

“We just fired our Optimization Strategists. As it turns out, guessing works just as well as testing.”

What’s weirder is that a group of people actually thought it was worth spending the time to discredit A/B testing (and I guess that means multivariate is dead too). Anyway, landing pages are still cool – just not the way you choose what they should do or say.

Despite being bad news, we’re not afraid of a challenge. So we actually hooked up with the group in question and put together an initial panel of expert CEO’s (the HiPPOs as it were) that you can ask some conversion advice from.

About Oli Gardner

Unbounce co-founder Oli Gardner has seen more landing pages than anyone on the planet. He’s obsessed with identifying and reversing bad marketing practices, and his disdain for marketers who send campaign traffic to their homepage is legendary, resulting in landing page rants that can peel paint off an unpainted wall. A prolific international keynote speaker, Oli is on a mission to rid the world of marketing mediocrity by using data-informed copywriting, design, interaction, and psychology to create a more delightful experience for marketers and customers alike.
He was recently named the "The 2018 Marketer to Watch," in the under 46 category, by his mother.